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CoW Swap raises surplus fee cap on out-of-market limit orders from 0.98% to 99%

Limit orders that fill past their limit price now give up half the surplus with almost no ceiling. Market-order and volume fees are unchanged.

· Announced · Verified 2026-11-09 via official docs diff

Announced Nov 3, 2026: CoW Swap raises surplus fee cap on out-of-market limit orders from 0.98% to 99%. Affects: CoW Swap and CoW Protocol users whose limit or TWAP orders are placed away from the market and later fill beyond their limit price. Source: docs.cow.fi, verified Nov 9, 2026. If this rules CoW Swap out, our top-listed alternative is 1inch (0% round trip).

Official site: 1inch.com

Surplus fee cap, out-of-market limit orders 0.98% of volume→99% of volume
Share of surplus taken 50%→50% (unchanged)
Quote improvement fee cap, market orders 0.98% of volume→0.98% (unchanged)
On a $10,000 trade (surplus fee on a $10,000 out-of-market sell limit order that fills $400 beyond its limit price) $98.00→$200.00

CoW Protocol updated its fee documentation on 3 November 2026 to raise the cap on its surplus fee for out-of-market limit orders from 0.98% to 99% of order volume. The fee itself stays at 50% of the surplus. The core team made the change under CIP-90, the governance proposal that lets it set fee caps.

The surplus fee applies to limit orders and discrete TWAP orders that could not be filled when they were placed. When such an order later fills at a better price than its limit, the protocol keeps half of the difference. Until this change, that share was limited to 0.98% of the order's volume.

The pull request that documented the change says the 99% cap in practice removes the limit. On sell orders, half of the surplus can never reach 99% of volume. On buy orders, the cap only binds when the maximum sell amount is about three times what was actually sold. The cap is set at 99% rather than removed because the protocol requires fee factors below 1. The same pull request says it was not to be merged before the new policy was live.

Unchanged: the 50% quote improvement fee on market orders, still capped at 0.98% of volume, the 0.02% volume fee (0.003% on stablecoin and RWA pairs) and partner fees.

“50% of surplus on out-of-market limit orders, capped at 99% of the total volume of the order”

— CoW Protocol Docs, Fees

Who this affects

CoW Swap and CoW Protocol users whose limit or TWAP orders are placed away from the market and later fill beyond their limit price.

CoW Swap at a glance

CoW Swap is the main web interface for CoW Protocol, an intent-based DEX aggregator. You sign an order instead of sending a swap, and bonded solvers compete in batch auctions to fill it, matching traders directly where they can and routing the rest through onchain liquidity. It runs on Ethereum and nine other EVM chains.

Full CoW Swap sheet · 0.04% round trip

Official site: swap.cow.fi

More from the newsroom

Sources

Last checked . Fees and terms change often; the venue's own page wins if it disagrees with ours.

  1. CoW Protocol Docs: Fees — checked 2026-11-09
  2. CoW Protocol docs PR #683: Document the effective removal of the surplus fee cap on limit orders (merged 2026-11-03) — checked 2026-11-09
  3. CoW DAO Snapshot: CIP-90 Fee Policy Iteration — checked 2026-11-09

About DexSheet

DexSheet is an independent fee sheet for on-chain trading. It tracks the fees, custody, backers, incidents and availability of 98 crypto trading venues, with a dated source for every number. Every newsroom entry is checked against the venue's own announcement, docs or terms before it is published. Data: fees.json (CC BY 4.0) · RSS.